First Blizzard game to fail horribly ?

[May90]

Please, stop using words without understanding what they mean. "Casual" play has nothing to do with skill, it has to do with how often a person plays and how seriously he/she takes gaming. Casual player might be one of the best players in the world who recently, say, won a championship and retired, but still plays from time to time - for example, Sean Plott is a casual Starcraft 2 player, even if he has won a Starcraft 1 USA championship at some point of his life and is VERY good at Starcraft 2 (he claims to have 3 separate accounts for each race, each having a Grandmaster status - looking at his macro skills in his Monobattles dailies, I'm inclined to believe him). Or someone might just be very talented at a game but not interested in playing it seriously, he just logs in once a month and destroys everyone - pretty much like Paul Morphy in Chess who had played for years very casually, not caring about studying theory or anything like that, and yet he was definitely the best player in the world.

There are no "casual games". There are casual gamers, and they might be both very bad and very good in terms of skill.

Both LoL and HotS are very friendly towards casual players. A person can open the game the first time in his life and get into action right away. Compare it to, say, Europa Universalis where, if you don't know how to play, you just won't be able to do anything meaningful, only some random actions without understanding what's going on in the game - now that game, indeed, requires some dedication to start really enjoying it. But LoL - no, you can enjoy it since the first second in game.

[Kaleredar]

Black and White sold lots of copies on release, but it was a buggy, incomplete piece of shit full of empty promises from Molyneaux.

Heavy Rain sold lots of copies, but it's considered one of Cage's worst games (David Cage is a hack).

Diablo 3 sold lots of copies, but it was a piece of shit until RoS came out; then RoS made it worse with seasons (I never saw a game mode die so fast like season 1).

Sales =/= good game.

Except Diablo 3 didn't get bad reviews for gameplay. The main criticisms were launched at the "always online" DRM.

[Tya]

Black and White sold lots of copies on release, but it was a buggy, incomplete piece of shit full of empty promises from Molyneaux.

Heavy Rain sold lots of copies, but it's considered one of Cage's worst games (David Cage is a hack).

Diablo 3 sold lots of copies, but it was a piece of shit until RoS came out; then RoS made it worse with seasons (I never saw a game mode die so fast like season 1).

Sales =/= good game.

Right so we should just rate what games are good or not based on whimsical feelings then?

You really didn't think your post through very much.

[May90]

I wonder where people get this idea of Diablo 3 having been negatively received by players. Like, what facts do they base it on? Do they just look at Metacritic user score (on which 90% of reviews are made by trolls) and then make this conclusion?

[Kaleredar]

I wonder where people get this idea of Diablo 3 having been negatively received by players. Like, what facts do they base it on? Do they just look at Metacritic user score (on which 90% of reviews are made by trolls) and then make this conclusion?

Fastest selling game in history + nothing but universally good reviews from critics.

But because a handful of people don't feel compelled to play it over and over again for 10 years, apparently it's "a horrible failure."

[May90]

Fastest selling game in history + nothing but universally good reviews from critics.

But because a handful of people don't feel compelled to play it over and over again for 10 years, apparently it's "a horrible failure."

The way I understand it, the main critic of Diablo 3 was that it wasn't Diablo 2. I remember multiple threads coming on the release day when people said things like, "What is this? In Diablo 2 we could pick stats ourselves and here they are given automatically? What a terrible game". But these things happen to, pretty much, every sequel, and in time people get used to the new game and stop comparing it to the predecessor (which, again, is exactly what happened to Diablo 3: a few months in - and those threads were gone).

Same thing here. People see that HotS is different from LoL and use this fact to criticize it. "No last hitting mechanics? OMG", "No items? What a sucky game", "XP is shared among heroes? Filthy casuals!". I bet, if it was the opposite and HotS existed before and it was the LoL that were in the development, then same people would just call LoL "casual" and say that HotS is where MOBAs are at.

[Deleted]

Except Diablo 3 didn't get bad reviews for gameplay. The main criticisms were launched at the "always online" DRM.

You know that reviews are done by critics what play game for few hours. So their opinion on the game is pretty much nonsense. Yust go and try play diablo 3. You will notice that this game is completly dead.

[Thimagryn]

You know that reviews are done by critics what play game for few hours. So their opinion on the game is pretty much nonsense. Yust go and try play diablo 3. You will notice that this game is completly dead.

Well the season is just about to end and everyone's waiting on the next patch to arrive. That's like saying WoW is dead the few months prior to a new Raid Patch launch. There's still plenty of people playing it, or do you consider games that you specifically aren't playing to be dead?

[Mormolyce]

IMO the criticisms of D3 were pretty nonsensical, it was excoriated for "not being D2" but when you looked at the actual complaints, they were either about things that were even worse in D2 (but everyone's conveniently forgotten because it was decades ago) or were attempts to improve things that were horribly broken in D2 and were for the most part successful. All of the changes in RoS that got it praise were serious departures from the D1/D2 formula (eg, no more N/NM/Hell, smart loot, soulbinding etc).

I actually enjoyed the original D3 and didn't see what everyone was so mad about, but RoS changes were definite improvements all the same. While retardedly hard Inferno was fun for a while, the new smooth difficulty system is so much better and more modern.

All in all, vanilla D3 was if anything too much like older Diablos, and there was a big culture shock for modern gamers. Even people who played D2 didn't remember it accurately because games have changed so much since then and so have they. RoS modernised the formula a lot but when you get right down to it, Diablo itself was a 90s modernisation of the 80s Roguelike genre, so it's kind of not surprising that it's not as appealing to the mainstream as other Blizzard titles. It's just an old fashioned type of game.

- - - Updated - - -

Black and White sold lots of copies on release, but it was a buggy, incomplete piece of shit full of empty promises from Molyneaux.

Heavy Rain sold lots of copies, but it's considered one of Cage's worst games (David Cage is a hack).

Diablo 3 sold lots of copies, but it was a piece of shit until RoS came out; then RoS made it worse with seasons (I never saw a game mode die so fast like season 1).

Sales =/= good game.

Absolutely correct, good game is completely subjective.

[Keeponrage]

Same thing here. People see that HotS is different from LoL and use this fact to criticize it. "No last hitting mechanics? OMG", "No items? What a sucky game", "XP is shared among heroes? Filthy casuals!". I bet, if it was the opposite and HotS existed before and it was the LoL that were in the development, then same people would just call LoL "casual" and say that HotS is where MOBAs are at.

..and I must add that all of these "pros" are direct consequences of features/limitations in WC3 engine/editor.